40 Jahre Partikelforschung/40 Years of Particle Research Bern, 11.-13. Februar 2009 Abstract |
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Denis Paillard (Paris)
A comparative approach of particles in Russian, French and Cambodian 1. Contrary to the wide spread analysis of particles as « too language-specific to justify crosslinguistic treatment » (Sasse, 1993 quoted by Weydt, 2006), I claim, after Weydt, that « particle is a category and has as such universal validity, just like other linguistic terms such as verb and noun » (Weydt, 2006 : 206). In our communication, we intend to consider « particles » as a subgroup of discourse markers showing particular semantic and formal properties which can be brought out in different languages. Whereas in Russian particles form a group quite easy to identify (and acknowledged as such in the grammatical tradition), in other languages, such as French or Cambodian the notion of particle is definitely not obvious. 2. The term of « particles » is used by some authors to refer to any discourse marker. It is the case in particular in such books as Approaches to Discourse Particles (K. Fischer ed., 2006) or the Belgian Journal of linguistics, 16 : « Particles ». In both cases, this term refers to highly heterogeneous groups of markers, showing no way to make out what they have in common on either the formal, semantic or pragmatic level. In this respect, Weydt’s work, in particular the above mentioned paper, makes a notable exception. 3. Various analyses on discourse markers (DM) in Russian and French made it possible to work out a typology. We draw a distinction between four classes of DM, each one contributing to the construction of the referential value of an utterance (referential value being defined as what an utterance says about a state of affairs of the world, understood as « what is the case ») : - Discourse words: they specify on what grounds a sequence corresponding to their scope is « a partial and biased way to express a state of affairs » (cf. in French d’ailleurs, quand même, effectivement, vraiment, malheureusement, naturellement). (1) – As-tu voté aux présidentielles ? – Non. D’ailleurs, je ne vote jamais. Did you vote for the Presidential election? No. D’ailleurs, I never vote (2) J’aurais bien voulu vous amener mon mari. Malheureusement, il n’a pas pu venir. I wish my husband could come with me. Malheureusement, he couldn’t - « Non commiting way to say » words : words expressing the non commitment of the locutor regarding the content of part of an utterance (3) J’ai, pour ainsi dire, une âme littéraire I have , pour ainsi dire, a litterary spirit (4) Devuška otvetila suxo i nejtral’no : mol, ej voobšče vse ne nravitsja (Russian) The girl answered with a sharp and neutral tone : mol, generally speaking nothing suited her (« meaning by that that… »). - Modal DW, blurring the relationship between the utterance and « what is the case » (cf. in French : en quelque sorte, genre ; in English : in a manner of speaking, as it were, like ; in Russian budto, kak by) (5) Čto ty valjaešsja, budto tebe i na rabotu ne nado What is the matter with you hanging about like that, budto ( « seemingly », « amiss ») you don’t have to go to work. - Discourse particles In Russian, particles place an utterance in relation to another one (whether explicit or not) in order to express « what is the case » (6) – Prideš’ ? - Da už pridu - Are you coming ? – Yes, I am (but reluctantly, were it just for me, I’d rather not). I’m coming is presented as forcing over I am not willing to come) (7) Čto ty tam sidiš’ celye dni. Ty im mešaes’. Ved’ Saša tjaželo bolen What is the matter with you, lingering over there all day long ? You do bother them. Ved’ Sach is seriously ill. Sacha’s illness is presented as an evidence which seems to be ignored by whom this is spoken to ; (8) Ja vzjala (‘take’) bylo s soboj sigarety, a ix net I thought I had taken my cigarettes, but I don’t find them. Bylo shows the structured coexistence of ‘take’ and ‘not take’, both values being actualised, but with a gap. In this talk, I will show that in such languages as French or Khmer, which, unlike Russian, do not have a class of words similar to particles, some units, in some of their uses, show semantic properties comparable to those which can be met in the Russian particles. Those particle-like uses can be analysed as a discursive extension of their semantic properties. References: Fisher, K., (ed.), 2006, Approaches to discourse particles, Studies in pragmatics 1, Elsevier. Paillard, D., 2008, à paraître, « Marqueurs discursifs et scène énonciative » PU de Normandie. Particules énonciatives en russe contemporain I, II et III, Institut des Etudes Slaves, 1986 – 1987 (D. Paillard éd.). Van der Wouden, Ton Foolen, Ad & Van de Craen, Piet (eds), 2003, Particles, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company. (Belgian Journal of linguistics, 16). |
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